"Rest for Your Soul" (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost)

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

16 "But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 17 "We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.' 18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, "He has a demon'; 19 the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

25 At that time Jesus said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. 28 "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

             Last Saturday, Sallie, Kohl, and I had spent the day with some of our dear friends over at Stone Mountain, and after visiting the park and visiting for a while in their home, we all had dinner at a nice little Thai restaurant attached to a Chevron station. After dinner, and after saying farewell to our friends, we got back on the road, heading towards our hotel where we would spend the  night before spending the next few days on vacation.

We came to a stoplight when I heard Sallie say, “Wow! Look at that! I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that bright before.” I looked over to the right side of the road, and there, arching through the sky, was that brilliant, polychromatic reminder of God’s peace and covenant with creation, a rainbow. It was truly the brightest rainbow I think I’ve ever seen, and it was even a double rainbow—the prominent, bright rainbow with another, less brilliant bow above it. Sallie was wowed by its brilliance, but I tried my best to dull its edge by explaining that rainbows can only appear when the sun is at a certain angel from the horizon in the morning or afternoon and that a rainbow’s brightness is determined by the directness of sunlight and the distance and density of precipitation from the viewer…What was I doing? The same thing so many of us do with the simple, glorious gifts of this life; we all but ruin them by overcomplicating, overexplaining, and overanalyzing them. We’re too ready to explain them away and not simply appreciate them for what they are in the moment God gives them to us. We do it with everything from rainbows to butterflies to purple and orange streaked sunsets. Why, we even do it with the simple gifts granted to us by God in our lives of faith.

I suppose it starts out innocently enough. It’s an itch we need to scratch, a curiosity that compels us to ask questions, to determine motives and meanings. We take something we’ve been given and try to figure it out. Sort of like how, when I was about nine or ten years old, I took my mom’s hairdryer apart to see how it worked instead of just being content with the knowledge that it did work (at least it did before I took it apart). It starts as curiosity, a desire to understand “why” or “how” something is rather than receiving it with thankfulness and sharing it with others. It’s not enough for us to simply receive God’s grace, we want to know how God’s grace is imparted to us: is it through the sacraments, prayer, anointing, baptism? It isn’t enough for us to simply acknowledge the mystery of God’s existence in the Trinity, we have to dissect it, prove it, label all explanations that fall short as heresy. It isn’t enough to have faith, we’ve got to have doctrine to define our faith, rules and regulations that tell us and others what our faith is all about and whether they’re in line with us or not. It may start out as a compulsion of curiosity, but it so often leads to lists of rules, regulations, and restrictions. It’s then that we lose sight of the simplicity of God’s good and gracious gifts.

You know. I think that may be what Jesus is getting at in these first verses of our text this morning. Jesus says, “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.'” We’re folks who are so busy looking around for something that we miss the sound of the flute calling us to dance or the sound of those wailing calling us to mourn. We can be so caught up in our desires for doctrinal purity that we ignore that music of God’s calling, that calling to come and dance, to rejoice in the presence of Christ, to find joy in the reality of Jesus’ unfailing love. We can be so obsessed with right-thinking that we grow deaf to the cries of our brothers and sisters who live in poverty and despair; we can become so fixated on whatever sin we find most egregious that we can’t hear the wailing of our sisters and brothers who’ve been locked outside the walls of our churches, kept at a distance, forced to the margins, all the while God mourns for them—and us. I think that’s what Jesus is driving at in this short parable: we can become so engrossed in the complexities of life and faith, complexities which we have created, that we miss what God has placed right before us.

What may be most unfortunate about such short-sightedness is that it tends to paint us into a corner, a very tight, lonely corner. You see, we can become so focused on these sorts of things, that we begin draw lines and erect walls meant to clearly outline what we believe is right and wrong, in and out, but so often what winds up happening is that we close ourselves inside a box in which we don’t even belong. The rules, regulations, and restrictions soon become contradictory, and when that happens, it’s often too late for us to recognize the foolishness inherent in our own actions.

I think this is what Jesus was getting at when he speaks about his cousin John and himself in verses 18 and 19: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon'; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'” The religious folks of the day had decided that John was a quack because of his dietary restrictions and his abstaining from alcohol, but the same folks critiqued Jesus because of his more liberal approach to food and drink. You see, we can begin to outline and define so many religious rules and restrictions—telling ourselves that it’s for the good of the community, for the good of ourselves—that many of those rules and restrictions will begin to contradict each other, or they’ll begin to contradict the social mores and cultural norms of our societies, and we will either choose to ignore such contradictions, using them to our own advantage when the proper situation arises (our opposition is a “teetotaler from the desert, so he must be crazy,” or our opposition is a “free loving hippie who drinks and eats with sinners and tax collectors, so he must be crazy”), or we will easily give them up when they make us uncomfortable or surrender them in exchange for that which makes us comfortable. We will proclaim the truth of forgiveness of our own sins, but decry the sins of those whose lives seem far more scarred than our own.
            It is indeed a heavy burden to bear, to be the judge of others, to feel the weight of responsibility for the righteousness of those we’ve deemed outside the lines, to see ourselves as the lone crusader out to rid the world of sin and to call everyone to repentance and a life of right-living (a life that looks an awful lot like our own). It’s a wearying task to be the one who stands at the precipice of the future, attempting to stem the changing tides, to hold back the seemingly inevitable, to be the one with a new cause each week, a new effort each month, a new bone to pick every day. And folks, I know too many of us who are carrying around such burdens, too many of us who believe it’s up to us to preserve this complex system of rules and rituals we’ve been given. Too many are buckling under the pressure; too many are losing sight of the reason they ever felt called to such a path of discipleship; too many are struggling under the weight of the yoke they’ve made for themselves, a yoke of self-righteousness and judgement.

            There are far too many of us struggling with the delusion that “it’s all up to me…that God is counting on me to get everything done”—as if God isn’t powerful enough to do what God has in mind to do! There are far too many of us struggling under the burden of religion and all of its trappings—trappings we’ve created with our desire to create comfort for ourselves and our own people and judgement and damnation for others. We’ve labored under this yoke for too long, and the truth is we’re only sinking under its weight. We’re tired, exhausted, on the brink of giving up (the truth is, many already have), some are angry, defensive, frustrated, while still others are confused, broken, and afraid—so many of us are just plain wore out from all of what we might label as “religion” these days.

            When that burden has dragged us down to the ground, when our very souls feel too tired to carry on, we hear Jesus say, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." Jesus’ words are an invitation to discipleship, an invitation to rest. Christ’s call is a call to lay down the burdens we’ve heaped onto ourselves, to let go of this notion that we’re somehow the ones who will keep the whole history of Christianity from careening off a cliff. Jesus’ call is one to let go of our created complexities of religion and to take up the easy yoke of love, love for God and others.

            I am convinced that too many of us are carrying around with us the burden of religion, the weight of doctrine, or right-and-wrong, of dos-and don’ts. Too many of us are laboring under the load of proof-texts and the various -isms we’ve created to explain why and what we believe. Too many of us are weighed down with the perceived sins of others, trying to correct what we see as their greater sins, and every one of us laboring under such a yoke must be exhausted. Surely, if you are laboring under such a yoke today, you’ve come into this place exhausted too.

            Let me invite you to lay down those burdens, to let go of that long list you keep written in your mind of what’s right and what’s wrong, to cease worrying yourself to death over things you cannot change, over things that must change, over things that won’t change. Let me invite you this morning to give up whatever weight it is that keeps you from experiencing the simply gifts of faith, hope, and love that Christ gives to us all, simple gifts we are called to simply share. I invite you this morning to come to Christ, the one who promises to give you rest from your self-made burdens, the one who promises to give you rest in the simple, powerful, and beautiful reality of his unending love. I invite you to take up his yoke, to cast aside your own, to take up his yoke, and follow him on this eternal journey marked by (in the words of the Apostle Paul) faith, hope, and love, of which the greatest (and perhaps the simplest) is love. Amen.